No More Learning

But this mere repetition is not poetry.
He who shall simply sing, with however glowing enthusiasm, or with
however vivid a truth of description, of the sights, and sounds, and
odors, and colors, and sentiments which greet _him _in common with all
mankind--he, I say, has yet failed to prove his divine title. There is
still a something in the distance which he has been unable to attain. We
have still a thirst unquenchable, to allay which he has not shown us the
crystal springs. This thirst belongs to the immortality of Man. It is at
once a consequence and an indication of his perennial existence. It is
the desire of the moth for the star. It is no mere appreciation of the
Beauty before us, but a wild effort to reach the Beauty above. Inspired
by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave, we struggle
by multiform combinations among the things and thoughts of Time
to attain a portion of that Loveliness whose very elements perhaps
appertain to eternity alone. And thus when by Poetry, or when by Music,
the most entrancing of the poetic moods, we find ourselves melted into
tears, we weep then, not as the Abbate Gravina supposes, through excess
of pleasure, but through a certain petulant, impatient sorrow at our
inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth, at once and for ever,
those divine and rapturous joys of which _through' _the poem, or
_through _the music, we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses.

The struggle to apprehend the supernal Loveliness--this struggle, on the
part of souls fittingly constituted--has given to the world all _that
_which it (the world) has ever been enabled at once to understand and
_to feel _as poetic.

The Poetic Sentiment, of course, may develop itself in various modes--in
Painting, in Sculpture, in Architecture, in the Dance--very especially
in Music--and very peculiarly, and with a wide field, in the com
position of the Landscape Garden. Our present theme, however, has regard
only to its manifestation in words. And here let me speak briefly on the
topic of rhythm. Contenting myself with the certainty that Music, in
its various modes of metre, rhythm, and rhyme, is of so vast a moment
in Poetry as never to be wisely rejected--is so vitally important an
adjunct, that he is simply silly who declines its assistance, I will not
now pause to maintain its absolute essentiality.
It is in Music perhaps
that the soul most nearly attains the great end for which, when inspired
by the Poetic Sentiment, it struggles--the creation of supernal Beauty.
It _may _be, indeed, that here this sublime end is, now and then,
attained in _fact. _We are often made to feel, with a shivering delight,
that from an earthly harp are stricken notes which _cannot _have been
unfamiliar to the angels. And thus there can be little doubt that in
the union of Poetry with Music in its popular sense, we shall find the
widest field for the Poetic development. The old Bards and Minnesingers
had advantages which we do not possess--and Thomas Moore, singing his
own songs, was, in the most legitimate manner, perfecting them as poems.

To recapitulate then:--I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as
_The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. _Its sole arbiter is Taste. With
the Intellect or with the Conscience it has only collateral relations.
Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with Duty or with
Truth.

A few words, however, in explanation. _That _pleasure which is at once
the most pure, the most elevating, and the most intense, is derived, I
maintain, from the contemplation of the Beautiful. In the contemplation
of Beauty we alone find it possible to attain that pleasurable
elevation, or excitement _of the soul, _which we recognize as the Poetic
Sentiment, and which is so easily distinguished from Truth, which is the
satisfaction of the Reason, or from Passion, which is the excitement of
the heart. I make Beauty, therefore--using the word as inclusive of the
sublime--I make Beauty the province of the poem, simply because it is an
obvious rule of Art that effects should be made to spring as directly
as possible from their causes:--no one as yet having been weak enough to
deny that the peculiar elevation in question is at least _most readily
_attainable in the poem. It by no means follows, however, that the
incitements of Passion' or the precepts of Duty, or even the lessons of
Truth, may not be introduced into a poem, and with advantage; for they
may subserve incidentally, in various ways, the general purposes of
the work: but the true artist will always contrive to tone them down in
proper subjection to that _Beauty _which is the atmosphere and the real
essence of the poem.

I cannot better introduce the few poems which I shall present for
your consideration, than by the citation of the Proem to Longfellow's
"Waif":--

The day is done, and the darkness
Falls from the wings of Night,
As a feather is wafted downward
From an Eagle in his flight.

I see the lights of the village
Gleam through the rain and the mist,
And a feeling of sadness comes o'er me,
That my soul cannot resist;

A feeling of sadness and longing,
That is not akin to pain,
And resembles sorrow only
As the mist resembles the rain.